


how life changes

by slightlyoutoftime



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Domestic Disputes, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, M/M, Nesting, is that a tag?, that sounds bad but it's really just arguing, well pre-kid fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 05:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20186668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlyoutoftime/pseuds/slightlyoutoftime
Summary: When Auston told his mom that he and Mitch were getting married at the ripe old age of 21, she’d had a lot of advice. There’d been the usual stuff about never going to bed angry and always making time for each other but also how important it was to have their own space. She’d mentioned how essential it was to acknowledge anniversaries even when Mitch said he didn’t care. There was a discussion about how to be a good parent (if they ever made that choice) and not to let the kids pit them against one another. But his mom didn’t tell him anything about the knockdown, drag out fights that would erupt over interior decorating.





	how life changes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Doctors_Milkshake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Doctors_Milkshake/gifts).

> This is my first ever hockey fic, and my first ever fic fic in several years. So please excuse my rustiness as I start stretching my writing muscles again.  
This is for The_Doctors_Milkshake ! I hope it was worth the wait! You wanted Mitch nesting, and I just realized that Mitch doesn't actually ever get to nest in this, but I hope it still works!
> 
> title from: life changes by thomas rhett

When Auston told his mom that he and Mitch were getting married at the ripe old age of 21, she’d had a lot of advice. There’d been the usual stuff about never going to bed angry and always making time for each other but also how important it was to have their own space. She’d mentioned how essential it was to acknowledge anniversaries even when Mitch said he didn’t care. There was a discussion about how to be a good parent (if they ever made that choice) and not to let the kids pit them against one another. But his mom didn’t tell him anything about the knockdown, drag out fights that would erupt over interior decorating.

It took them four hours to decide on a crib.

It took seven hours to pick out a stroller.

The fight over what color to paint the nursery walls was currently at 42 hours and counting.

“One more.”

“Mitch, no.”

“Aus, please. Just one more.” He fiddled with the GPS and started punching an address in before Auston could protest. “For sure, this one will have it.”

He sort of wanted to pull his hair out and sort of wanted to pull Mitch’s hair out because they’d been to 17 hardware stores in the last two days. He’d signed enough receipts and smiled for so many pictures with starstruck employees that he was starting to get cramps in his wrist and cheeks. The back seat was littered with paint cards that he was convinced were identical. Auston was on his third double-double of the day, and, Babs help him, he was going to leave Mitch at the next store and take an Uber back to their house if they didn’t leave with paint.

When he told Mitch all of this, his husband just shrugged and stared absently at the road as Auston merged onto the interstate.

“Are we going to talk about this?”

Mitch didn’t look up from his phone. “Talk about what?”

“Whatever’s bothering you.”

That made Mitch look up. “What are you talking about?”

It took everything Auston had in him not to roll his eyes. Instead, he took a deep breath, ran a hand through his hair, and sighed in a calming manner that their therapist would have been proud of. “The fact that you are so stressed about having a baby that you’ve resorted to going to fucking—” Auston glanced at the GPS to see just exactly where Mitch was directing them. “Oh my god, are we going to fucking Mississauga for paint?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Auston saw Mitch flush. “I just—it just…” he sighed and pressed his face into his hands. “It should be perfect. And everything else felt wrong. And I just..I just…”

_Sniff._

_Sniff-sniff._

Oh god, if Mitch started crying, Auston was going to start crying.

Before he could wreck the truck over something as stupid as paint samples, Auston dove across three lanes of traffic until they were settled on the shoulder. He flipped off a few honking cars that whizzed by them.

Mitch had his face buried in his hands at this point, pressing so hard that his fingertips were starting to turn white.

“Mitchy, babe, what’s wrong?”

For a few silent, heart-pounding moments, Auston had the horrible vision of Mitch saying he didn’t want the baby anymore. The thought hit him like a Chara check into the boards—quick, brutal, and knocked the breath right out of him.

“Mitch…Mitch, you want this, right?”

His head snapped up so fast that Auston thought he might have broken something. Those blueblue eyes were pale and bloodshot now, teetering on the edge of tears. “Why would you say that? How can you ask that?” Mitch grabbed Auston’s hand and squeezed it.

Auston ran his thumb over the wedding band on Mitch’s ring finger.

“Because we’ve been all over Toronto looking for paint. You slept in the nursey last night so that you could ‘get a better feel for its vibes.’ I’m not actually sure you ate anything today because all you did was flip through sample cards.” Now he was the one who couldn’t look Mitch in the eye. “And that feels a little bit like deflection.” Auston tried to take another one of those deep, calming, therapist-approved breathing exercises, but it came out shaky. “And I would understand. I really would. Having a baby changes a lot. Fuck. It changes everything. But I thought we agreed that we were ready and that Willy was finally mature enough to be a babysitter if we needed it.” Mitch choked out a laugh in the middle of a sniffle. “But if it’s not that, then what’s wrong?”

Mitch’s hands started to shake, and when he finally spoke, it was barely above a whisper as though saying it out loud would make it true.

“What if we don’t get her this time either?”

There were a lot of things that Auston would go back in time and change if he could. He’d stop Alex from jumping off of that swing and breaking her arm when she was nine. He’d tell his mom not to try and leave early for work the morning she got into a car accident. He’d keep his past self from taking that hit in the Jets game. He’d make sure that Freddy noticed the chippy ice in front of the net during Game 7. He’d warn Mitch about keeping his head down in the series with the Caps two years ago when Wilson had sent an elbow to his head and quite literally knocked him out of the rest of the playoffs. He’d prevent another half a dozen injuries, save a few goals, score a few hundred more. But he would trade all of those do-overs for his and Mitch’s first chance at a daughter not to have been snatched right out from under them.

They’d done all of this before. They’d picked out the crib and the stroller and bickered over who would get to hold her first. They’d done the team shower and had a babymoon in Cancun. In fact, they made it as far as painting the nursery before Auston took the call that wrecked both of their lives. The baby’s mother had changed her mind. She was going to keep her daughter. And Mitch hadn’t left their bedroom for three whole days. It was the reason they’d started seeing a therapist and bought a new house that didn’t have the half-formed remnants of a different life in it. But for a while there, it had been so bad and things had seemed so bleak that Auston wasn’t sure they’d ever recover.

Of course Mitch would balk at painting a nursery again.

“Mitchy…” Mitch pitched forward until he was slumped over the console and had his face pressed into Auston’s neck. A tear slipped under the collar of his jacket. “Mitchy, baby, we’re going to get her. We’ve signed all the papers. We’ve talked to her birth mom. It’s happening.”

“But wha—”

“If for some crazy reason, it doesn’t happen again…well then, we’ll just keep trying.” He ran a hand over Mitch’s sandy hair, letting his fingernails scratch gently against the base of his scalp. “We can’t give up just because it didn’t work out the first time. I mean, otherwise, we’d never have those rings, right?”

“Yeah,” he said softly from somewhere around Auston’s collarbone.

“So, we’ll drive to fucking Mississauga to find the absolutely perfect shade of yellow. And then we will finally, finally drive home and paint that room, okay? Because this is going to happen.”

It wasn’t a question or a reassurance. Just a statement, steady and sure.

He could feel Mitch smiling against the side of his face now, and when he pulled back a little bit further, he could see the bright grin for himself. “It’s going to happen.”

“It’s going to happen,” Auston agreed. He leaned across the gear shift and kissed Mitch. It wasn’t anything hot or dirty like most of their kisses eventually devolved into. It was just something simple and soft, a promise.

He leaned back and allowed himself a moment to look at his husband before he started the truck and pulled back onto the highway, their hands twined together over the console.

“Auston?”

“Yeah, Mitch?”

“What about wallpaper?”

**Author's Note:**

> (also, if it's not clear, that line about them having to try several times for those rings does not mean that somebody had to propose more than once. it does, in fact, refer to stanley cup rings.)


End file.
